Alison Roman built one of the most loyal audiences in food media with best-selling cookbooks, recipes that went viral and a widely read newsletter. Now she’s selling her own tomato sauce, at $12.99 a jar, to that same audience. It’s a bet that those readers know what other options are available, and would opt for that special fennel taste, or the shallot-anchovy blend she’s known for.
The jars will be sold to shoppers in independent stores nationwide, at a price that’s above what many see as a premium sauce product: Rao’s. Campbell’s bought parent company Sovos Brands in 2023 as part of a $2.7 billion deal, and the sauce sells for about $8. For Roman, she’s open about the price.
“If anything, I think it’s a deterrent,” Roman told Fortune. “But I also think it’s a different product.”
Roman relaunched the sauce as Roman’s on October 21 and began selling it to stores through Faire, its exclusive wholesale partner, which boasted $750 million in annualized revenue last quarter alone and is eyeing an IPO within the next year. Roman’s is one of about 100,000 brands selling to some 500,000 retailers on Faire.
The sauce started last fall as A Very Good Tomato Sauce, sold online and at First Bloom, the grocery store Roman opened in the Catskills. The brand is now in more than 100 stores across 30 states, and Roman is funding it with money from her other businesses rather than through venture capital.
Changing the name on the jar
When she first launched it last year, Roman said fans kept asking why her name wasn’t on the label.
“It felt kind of tacky,” Roman said, since everyone knows she isn’t making the sauce herself. But even then, people were already calling it Alison Roman’s sauce. “Unless I named it something completely different that had nothing to do with me, I think people were probably always going to associate it with me and my name,” she said. “And so I kind of doubled down on that.”
That said, having a cool name helps. “If my name were something else, I don’t know that I would feel so bullish on that being my brand name,” she joked.
Roman isn’t the first to have built a brand out of her work, as plenty of big names have built businesses out of their personal brands. Take Shaquille O’Neal’s former agent, Leonard Armato, who told Fortune last month that O’Neal “owned his own brand,” and that the job was finding companies to build value in it.
For Roman, the businesses are a way to reach more people than she can on her own. “I can only write so many books. I can only do so many videos or write so many recipes,” she said. She keeps her writing and recipe development to herself, but the businesses bring in designers, operations staff—and, of course, the people stirring the sauce.
“When I’m writing a book, it’s just me and my laptop, and I can’t scale that,” she said. “But I can open a store. I can put sauce in 100 stores around the country with other people.”
What she’s offering, she said, is the trust she built over years of recipes that work. “If I’m gonna put my name on tomato sauce, or ask you to buy it, I need to make sure it’s really, really good,” she said. “My reputation is really important to me.” She isn’t sure the same path exists for newcomers in the food-encer space, those who didn’t write New York Times recipes and books and build her brand. “If I were to try to make it today, could I make it? I don’t know.”
Selling to strangers and fans
Those who have followed Roman understand the logic—she, and her fans, are those who are willing to spend a few hours making a nice Sunday sauce, just as they are happy to whip up a quick sauce out of somehow always-way-too-quickly rotting tomatoes. Anything that removes a deterrent from cooking, Roman said, is a plus in her book.
“The goal is someone just sees it on the shelf. They’re intrigued because, oh, spicy fennel or anchovy shallot,” she said. “Or they’re curious why it is expensive.”
So that’s why the jar is priced accordingly. It’s for people who know they have other alternatives, but if paying for something they believe is higher quality makes them more likely to cook at home than order out, so be it. Roman explained what goes into the sauce: The garlic is sliced, not chopped, and the sauce is cooked in small batches in kettles.
“There’s like a guy stirring,” she said. “And that means labor.” She hopes to lower the price as the business grows, but for now, as demand far outruns supply, she said it’s up to the consumer. She compared it to olive oil, which can cost anywhere from $4.99 to $29.99, if not more.
“It’s up to the consumer to decide what it is that you want to spend your money on, and if it’s worth it,” she said.
And she’s right: The first batch sold out online within 24 hours, and the sauce ran out again after its latest launch. Roman said it was more than she expected to sell but the company is working to speed up production, from ordering jars to getting sauce to the warehouse.
In addition to Faire and her upstate First Bloom store, she’s opening a second store near her Brooklyn Heights apartment in December. But in the weeks since the relaunch, Roman said shoppers have tagged her in photos from independent stores and while making new dishes. “This is a store that somebody opened with their own money,” she said. “And I’m in that store.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
